And while FISA doesn't affect spy activities overseas, the
attention it generates will refocus scrutiny on the National
Security Agency and its growing and astonishing capabilities.

After weathering criticism and high-profile legal challenges in
2005 for its warrantless wiretapping program, we have a decent
idea of the sophisticated and controversial methods the NSA
employs to penetrate global telecommunications networks.

Still in the shadows, however, is a secretive joint program with
the Central Intelligence Agency codenamed F6, but better known as
the Special Collection Service.

The Special Collection Service is America's master of covert
eavesdropping, placing super-high-tech bugs in unbelievably
hard-to-reach places, and using cutting-edge technology to crack
supposedly impenetrable encryption.

John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it
best: "When you think of NSA, you think satellites. When you
think CIA, you think James Bond and microfilm. But you don't
really think of an agency whose sole purpose is to get up real
close and use the best technology there is to listen and
transmit. That's SCS."

The Special Collection Service is
America's master of covert eavesdropping, placing super-high-tech
bugs in unbelievably hard-to-reach places.

Officially, the Special Collection Service doesn't exist, and
isn't headquartered in a guarded complex on a densely
forested 300-acre lot outside of Beltsville, Md. But
according to journalist James Bamford, the organization was
founded in 1978 to
bridge the NSA's ability to infiltrate foreign networks and the
CIA's ability to penetrate foreign countries. (Its leadership
alternates between the director of the NSA and the director of
the CIA.) At the Beltsville facility, special tactics for
tradecraft are devised, and a kind of mad scientist's laboratory
develops new technologies for use in the field.

The Special Collection Service is everywhere. In 1999, Special
Collection Elements infiltrated
Afghanistan to monitor al Qaeda training camps near
Khost. That same year, they tapped Pakistan's communications grid
to listen for traffic on its nuclear arsenal. After the U.S.
invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Keith Alexander, director of
the National Security Agency, sent Special Collection Elements to
supplement the U.S.
Joint Special Operations Command in Balad. (The director
personally spoke with General Stanley
McChrystal, then-commander of JSOC, by secure video
teleconference at least once a week.)

But long before al Qaeda pinged U.S. radars, the Special
Collection Service was invading communications networks
of friend and foe alike,
performing what Bob Woodward described as "espionage miracles,
delivering verbatim transcripts from high-level
foreign-government meetings in Europe, the Middle East, and
Asia." As far back as the 1980s, Special Collections Elements
were using a technique whereby invisible lasers are pointed at
windows from safe houses hundreds of feet away. Conversations are
then deciphered and recorded by measuring only the vibrations in
the glass of the target windowpane.

How exactly do these missions go down? Based on what we know, it
looks something like this: Special Collection Elements made up of
two to five people rotate into U.S. embassies around the world,
working undercover as Foreign Service officers or members of the
Diplomatic Telecommunications Service. When State Department
cover is impossible, the agents enter countries under the guise
of businesspeople. Some U.S. embassies are known to house
dedicated facilities for Special Collection Elements to use as
bases of operations. In other situations, and when circumstances
dictate, they work surreptitiously, assembling elaborate
listening devices from discrete, seemingly everyday components.
(Bamford reports one item previously used: An umbrella that
expands into a parabolic antenna.)

Once deployed, Special Collection Elements put technology
developed in Beltsville into practice. One such known system is
ORATORY, first used extensively during the Gulf War, and likely
still operational in some variation. After locating mission
objectives, Special Collection Elements place antennas in
nondescript locations and ORATORYgoes
"up" on the target. The device is given key words to listen for,
and when those topics come up by phone or in person, the system
captures the conversations for analysis.

The Special Collection Service also completes so-called "black
bag jobs." Intercepts are often encrypted, and it takes time to
decipher, translate, and identify useful information. So
sometimes, it's easier to simply break into a building and
install a hidden microphone, whereupon intelligence can be
gathered and voices recorded before encryption ever takes place.
Sensitive listening devices can be dropped into computer
keyboards, recording the unique clicks of each key for use in
reconstructing everything typed. When a lock pick is too risky,
however, locals are sometimes bribed to do the dirty work. Agents
might be tasked with something as small as planting a bug, or as
large as compromising a nation's entire information
infrastructure.

The utility of the Special Collection Service is self-evident.
While the raw computing power found at National Security Agency
headquarters seems limitless, signals intelligence has always
been a cat-and-mouse game. Every time the United States finds a
way into foreign networks, or deciphers some elaborate
encryption, foreign powers find a way to shut us out again. It's
been that way since the NSA's precursor, the Armed Forces
Security Agency, operated out of the Arlington Hall Junior
College for Women. Having someone on the ground, and eyes (and
ears) on a target effectively bypasses most technological
shielding.

In the coming months, as FISA is reconsidered and pointed
questions are rightfully asked of the National Security Agency —
about what its quantum computers can and cannot do, and what
its massive
data centers do and do not store — it's worth
remembering that signals intelligence is not collected entirely
from a Panopticon in Maryland. Don't forget the daring, intimate
work of the Special Collection Service, and the men and women
secretly in the field around the world.